Page 129 of Hush

We reach the split pine. The water rushes below, shallow but fast over dark stone, cold enough to numb a foot in minutes. Mud churns near the bank. Ferns are crushed in places. A broken branch hangs low over the water.

But Jonah isn’t there.

I stop so abruptly Parker nearly bumps into me.

My mind tries to correct the picture, to put Jonah where he belongs. Sitting against the pine, soaked, shivering, and furious with himself. Curled near the roots, ankle swollen, face brightening with relief when he sees me. Radio on the ground beside him. Pack caught in brush.

None of that is here.

“Jonah?” I call, louder now, and my voice cracks against the trees. “Jonah, answer me!”

Nothing.

My heart starts pounding in my throat. I step closer to the bank, scanning mud, stones, disturbed leaves. There are tracks, but too many half prints and smears to make sense of quickly. The mud near the crossing is torn up, but not like someone who was waiting while injured for rescue. More like someone moved through with purpose and then covered the worst of it badly.

Cold slides under my skin.

I turn toward Parker, every instinct suddenly awake and snarling. “Parker, what the hell is going—”

Pain explodes across the back of my skull before I can turn, so bright it erases the creek, the trees, Parker’s face, everything. My knees buckle, and for one impossible second, I’m still standing and falling at the same time, my body trying to understand a command it didn’t hear.

The bond flares.

Onyx.

His fear slams into me from somewhere distant, sudden and savage. I try to say his name, but my mouth won’t work.

The ground rushes up. Mud hits my palms, then my shoulder, cold water soaking through my sleeve. My vision breaks into pieces: brown creek, black root, Parker’s boots, the edge of my own hand clawing weakly at the earth. The sound of a crackling radio.

Through the bond, something tears open, wild and furious.

Mine.

Then darkness folds over me before I can answer.

41

Onyx

I know the moment Lucas goes quiet—not silent.

Silence is something I understand. Silence can be rest, stalking, listening, the patient hold of roots beneath winter soil. Silence can be the den after Lucas falls asleep with one hand on my chest, his breath warm and steady, his mind tucked safely behind the soft door of dreams. Silence can be trust.

This is not silence. This is absence.

One moment, the bond holds him at a distance, narrowed because he is angry with me for letting my fear speak too much like a command, and I let him leave with that anger still raw between us.

I feel him throughout the day as a guarded warmth I am careful not to press against, because Lucas Dawson is not a creature to be handled by closing fists, and I have learned that love can bruise when it mistakes itself for shelter.

So, I keep away. I stay in the trees. I track the wrong scents near North Ridge and grind my claws into bark until cedar splinters under them. I wait for him to come home angry and alive.

Then the guarded warmth cuts off.

I stop, and the forest stops with me.

A raven lifts from a branch and does not call. A vole freezes under leaf litter. Wind moves through pine needles, but the sound arrives dull, far away, as if the world has dropped itself beneath water. I stand halfway up a slope above the creek, one hand braced against a hemlock, skull turned toward the shape of the bond inside my chest.

Lucas?